By Bri Brands
Sponsored in collaboration with the Office of the Vice President for Research, this is the college's second year supporting the Summer Funding for Humanities Research program.
"CLAS is proud to support some of our most outstanding humanities faculty during summer, a time when they have the opportunity to focus on projects that advance the intellectual mission of the university while expanding our knowledge of literature, culture, and history, among other domains of scholarly endeavor," said Roland Racevskis, CLAS's associate dean for arts and humanities.
Faculty members selected for funding include: Seongjoon Ahn, Department of Political Science; David Cunning, Department of Philosophy; Kendall Heitzman, Department of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures, and Cultures; Cherrie Kwok, Department of English; Sarah Minor, Department of English; Stephanie Miracle, Department of Dance; Alyssa Park, Department of History; and Stephen Voyce, Department of English.
Applicants, who were chosen based on the merit of their research proposals, were awarded up to $7,500, which allows them to move projects forward such as books, articles, and creative and publicly engaged work.
“It is essential to support humanities scholarship that sparks critical dialogue and enriches our understanding of our world and our place in it,” said Kristy Nabhan-Warren, associate vice president for research at the University of Iowa. “Through their research, this year’s awardees are deepening our understanding of culture, history, politics, and human experience in ways that will resonate across disciplines, classrooms, and communities.”
Learn more about the awardees and their projects below.
Seongjoon Ahn
Seongjoon Ahn is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, specializing in American politics, democracy, and public opinion.
Ahn will spend the summer researching democracy in South Korea and Taiwan, ultimately aiming to understand how democratic citizens understand and give meaning to the idea of democracy, particularly in moments shaped by historical memory and ongoing geopolitical tension.
David Cunning
David Cunning is a professor and collegiate fellow in the Department of Philosophy. He is interested in freedom, agency, historical conceptions of mind and body, historical conceptions of God, the limits of knowledge, meta-philosophy, and the question of what we owe each other.
He will travel to New Brunswick, Canada to present a paper about agency and authority at the 2026 meeting of the International Margaret Cavendish Society. Additionally, Cunning will begin organizing his previously published papers on philosopher Baruch Spinoza into a book, and will travel to London to meet with a major Spinoza scholar.
Kendall Heitzman
Kendall Heitzman is an associate professor in the Department of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures, and Cultures, where he teaches Japanese and translates contemporary Japanese fiction and poetry.
He will take two separate trips to Mumbai, India and Budapest, Hungary to meet with former International Writing Program (IWP) participants and their family members. His research focuses on the early years of the public-facing IWP database.
Cherrie Kwok
Cherrie Kwok is an assistant professor of 19th- and 20th-century anglophone literature in the Department of English.
Her current book-in-progress, After Haiti: Decadence and Anti-Colonial Literature in the Global Nineteenth Century, examines how and why enslaved and colonized writers and their descendants used especially flowery language in their works. To support the project, she will attend three conference presentations and visit two separate archives in London, Paris, and Santa Cruz, CA.
Sarah Minor
Sarah Minor is an assistant professor in the Department of English that specializes in crossings between image and text. She teaches courses in creative nonfiction.
This summer, Minor will perform archival and immersive research on the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa, which will later be turned into a book that uses narrative retellings about the grotto tradition, framing Iowa's contemporary agricultural landscape within the wider scope of geologic time and spiritual practices.
Stephanie Miracle
Stephanie Miracle is an assistant professor in the Department of Dance and an international choreographer who investigates how ordinary/seen and imagined/unseen landscapes intersect.
Miracle's research focuses on the curation of live interdisciplinary performances. She has curated several projects over the last three and a half years, and will now make site visits to Czechia, Germany, and Turkey to expand the visibility of her research and enhance the university's international presence in interdisciplinary performance research.
Alyssa Park
Alyssa Park is an associate professor in the Department of History and a historian of modern Korea. Her research interests include borderlands, transnational migration, and empire in East Asia and Russia.
Park is currently writing her second book, Homeward: Korean Refugees and the Politics of Occupation, Division, and War, 1945 – 1950. This summer, she will work with The Bridge Research Network to study archives from the former Soviet Union and hire an assistant to help with additional research in Japanese secondary scholarship.
Stephen Voyce
Stephen Voyce is an associate professor in the Department of English. His research interests include 20th century poetry and culture, contemporary print and digital media, and the history of literary movements.
His book-in-progress, Dark Worlds: Culture, War, & the National Security State is close to completion. As such, he will travel to different facilities in Stockholm and Berlin to study artworks and historical materials essential to his project.